Buying a new laptop for photo editing

[kxfrog]

Hi

I am planning on buying a MacBook pro to replace my ageing (and dying) MacBook white. I regally use the laptop for coding in windows (visual studio, c #, mono etc...) I also use regularly Photoshop cs4 (may upgrade to cs5) to edit 15mp raw images and large panoramas (60mp+). I also would like to do some gaming and I need portability what will be the best configuration. Processor, ram, hard drive, ssd? I don't want to spend too much either.

 

[mynewromantica]

I bought the 15" base model for the exact same needs and I have absolutely no complaints. I would recommend doing the same.
The only downside is the screen size and HDD, but that is easily fixed with an external display and some external HDs or a new internal for a LOT less than apples upgrades.

Also, if you are going to play games on it you will probably want to revert back to 10.6.3, 10.6.4 has some driver issues for graphics cards.

 

[kxfrog]

The reason I need the laptop is for portability I hav a 24 inch apple led monitor hooked up to a Mac pro at home and I've got a 500gb 7200rpm HD which I can put in from my old MacBook, I'm just worrying about screen size, if I should get anti glare or high res or if it should get8gb ram ( I hav 12gb in the pro) I also think 256mb vram is useless and worry about crysis and bc2 and mw2. It needs to last around 3 years so...

 

[a.jfred]

I also just replaced a dying Windows desktop with a 15" base model MPB, and run CS4 on it. Absolutely *no* complaints for photo editing

 

[kxfrog]

And gaming?

 

[kxfrog]

Should I buy a refurb or not? Also is it worth getting anti glare or high resolution glossy? Or just normal

 

[banalelectric]

If you're looking to do photo editing outside of environments where you have control over lighting/glare, then anti-glare is really the only way to go. 15" isn't ideal, but the extra resolution will help. And some would argue that AG displays have superior color accuracy as well, but I'm not gonna go there.